An author's hijacking story holds lessons for us all

'When you can't completely feel your sadness, you can't completely feel your happiness,' notes author Mimi Nichter

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Hi friends! Today’s newsletter is part of an interview series about how people process trauma and make meaning from their challenging experiences.

An odd thing kept happening as I talked to writer and anthropologist Mimi Nichter about her incredible story of being held hostage by terrorists: I kept relating to it. Not in a “Oh, her story is like an episode of Homeland!” way, but, surprisingly, in a “I know what you’ve been through and what it took to endure” way.

At first, I resisted sharing this thought with her. It felt absurd and maybe even selfish to equate my experience to hers, which she has documented in a memoir she hopes to publish. The book, “Hostage: A Memoir of Terrorism, Trauma, and Resilience,” recounts her experience as a twenty-year-old who was on one of three airplanes hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 1970. 

But Mimi was curious about my story, too. I admitted that I felt like I understood—to a degree—what she had been through. After we spoke in length about our experiences, I’ve been pondering these commonalities, the “through lines” in which people can find common ground. Here are several from our recent conversation that stood out for me:

A key element of many types of trauma is the sense of being trapped or having no escape – whether physically or emotionally. When Mimi told me about being detained for six days on an airplane, with no running water, flushable toilets or air conditioning, I thought of my exhausting and awful week-long postpartum hospital stay, where for hours I was stuck in a maternal ICU ward with no bathroom, no food, no water, and worst of all, no access to my baby, who was in the NICU. I included this “scene” in an article I wrote for Cosmopolitan Magazine. Mimi, meanwhile, shared her story in Newsweek:

“Certain that no one could understand my ordeal, I buried those weeks of my life, rarely speaking of my experience, caught in a liminal space between captivity and freedom. Recurring nightmares of bombs and explosions plagued me. Loud noises and small spaces made me edgy. Yet even in therapy, I never spoke of it.”

Images from Mimi’s website related to her hostage experience

No matter how well intended, other people’s reactions to stressful events can be disappointing, in part because they are predictable. Mimi said she rarely told people what had happened to her, because they tended to get excited—like her life was an action movie, when it most certainly was not. “When people responded in that way, as it being this exciting story, I just was so put off,” Mimi said. “You know, it just seemed like a wrong and uncomfortable interpretation.”

Compartmentalization is a powerful tool, but it won’t hold indefinitely. Mimi went on to have a successful career as an anthropologist. She didn’t even tell her kids any details, nor her therapist. When she retired right before the pandemic, though, something was unleashed. Her kids were grown, her job pressures were lighter, it was the right time to revisit her past. She started writing, and cried every day while writing her memoir. 

I had a somewhat similar experience during the pandemic, when I realized I could no longer fully bury the emotions I felt around my mother’s prolonged mental health crisis. When all of a sudden my husband and daughter were home all the time, and I no longer had a private, quiet place to decompress. It all started to catch up with me, and the stress started making me sick. I decided I was done suffering and was ready to put everything behind me. The first thing I had to do was “unpack.”

For both of us, writing provided a way out

Rather than feel annoyed that I was reliving my own story as I listened to hers, Mimi was reassured.

“Very few people will have this traumatic experience that I had. But, people can still relate to it, right?,” she said. “So many people have PTSD. There's something that changes our psyche, alters it, puts us on a different path. I think it’s helpful to see how people move out of that, how it affects them, how something so different (yet similar) affected them, and how over time, how they dealt with it.” 

There’s of course another obvious commonality between Mimi and me: We both decided to sit down and write entire books about our experiences. We both found it healing, like so many memoir writers, but also exhausting. Neither of us are published yet, and we’re at a weird stage: Do we press forward with the tiresome process of trying to find a commercial publisher? Regardless, we’re glad we made the effort to write it down.

“I knew I was healing when I stopped crying [while writing],” she said. “It changed from weeping to more like teary eyes and a few years dropping and saying, ‘Oh my god, how did I carry this for so many years? Where did I carry it? How did I not think of this?’ It was like a testament to the weight of the problem…when you can't completely feel your sadness, you can't completely feel your happiness.”

Mimi Nichter, Ph.D. is Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona School of Anthropology, where she holds joints appointments in the College of Public Health and the Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences.